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Has Violence Against Teachers Become Accepted by Society?

148 points · 332 comments · obscurette

  1. ValueTheory · · focus · HN ↗
    "The parents of the student who assaulted me sued the district, claiming it had failed to prevent the incident. Suddenly, I found myself on phone calls with administrators and attorneys questioning whether I had done enough to stop the assault."

    This is the root of the problem. Of course, civil lawsuits are important to correct actual wrongs, but school districts seem to be so cowardly in the face of bad lawsuits that they are willing to throw teachers under the bus to avoid them.

    1. runjake · · focus · HN ↗
      > but school districts seem to be so cowardly in the face of bad lawsuits

      It's not so much that they're cowardly, it's that they don't have budget for the lawyers to deal even with the bad lawsuits.

      That, and the court of public opinion is a thing, and it's not reasonable, and it's powerful. It takes down boards of education, gets leadership wrongly fired, and so on.

      1. Henchman21 · · focus · HN ↗
        They don’t have budget to put food on their teachers tables or supplies in the classroom.

        We put teachers in an impossible situation — “raise the next generation with no investment from current generations” — and then get pissed off when they fail?

        Our world has become a Kafka-esque nightmare.

        1. runjake · · focus · HN ↗
          The ugly secret is that vast amounts of teachers are leaving the field, but there's also an inexplicably vast fresh supply of new teachers coming out of universities, so it sort of perpetuates the conditions.

          I don't anticipate change until this fresh supply dries up and people start asking why.

        2. ethbr1 · · focus · HN ↗
          > world has become a Kafka-esque nightmare

          Of note that Kafka-esque is predicated on an impenetrable morass of regulations and procedures.

          Imho, we've overly and prematurely optimized to address negative outcomes without remembering that adding red tape also decreases the efficiency of delivering good outcomes.

          It'd be nice to see a lot of professions move back towards 'we'll regularly audit to see if there are problems, then address them if they appear' postures.

          Time spent in pre-compliance when there would have been no problem is simply lost efficiency.

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